[MtnClimber]

Author of Roe v. Wade. Yep. But we have several marxists now competing for the honor of being the absolute worst.

[HighSierra5]

Banning alcohol was bad but at least it was a constitutional amendment. Roe versus Wade was a subversive judicial plot to kill millions of babies. Thank God AND Trump for its reversal.

[Stingray51]

Kennedy’s decision on gay marriage in Obergefell was just as bad IMO. Like Roe, it had zero basis in the Constitution and has led directly, in only 7 years, to drag queen story hour in kindergartens and confused boys being pushed into having their privates chopped off. Sad. And by a Reagan appointee.

[Tell It Right]

My vote for worst SCOTUS justice is Robert H. Jackson. He wrote the opinion in Wickard v Filburn that basically said the federal government can regulate what a farmer grows on his own land for his own (or his animals') consumption because in Jackson's feeble mind it still counted as "interstate commerce".

This threw the enumerations clause of the Constitution into the trash bin. It set a precedent by government calling anything they want to regulate by any terminology that the Constitution gives the government the authority of.

[nuke_road_warrior]

Rodger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision.

[Bonemaker]

Stephens and Suter are way up there too.

[j.havenfarm]

Blackmun was a weak man whose wife heavily pressured to toe the leftist line on abortion. He agonized for years after…. Good! He said he felt much better when, after a speech, Jane Roe herself ran on the stage and gave him a hug .

[libertylover]

Don’t forget David Souter. I don’t think he EVER got one right.

[Midwesterner53]

I vote for Earl Warren, no one is close to his destructiveness.

[Paal Gulli]

Blackmun also voted to let Cassius Clay off the hook on his conviction for draft-dodging.

SCOTUS overturned his conviction not on the merits of the case but on the fact that the court that convicted Clay didn't publish its reasons for rejecting the Louisville Lip's claim of Conscientious Objection. The fact that the claim was absurd on its face (because the Nation of Islam in institutionalized racism posing as a religion) didn't seem to sway the Supreme Court.

Then as today, to qualify as a Conscientious Objector, one's objection must be a blanket moral objection to war in general, and not to the moral basis for any given war. Clay never voiced any overarching objection to war in general but repeatedly stated he didn't want to fight in Vietnam because, “...[N]o Vietcong ever called me n*gger.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/opinion/muhammad-ali-vietnam-war.html

[nicollo]

“cruel and unusual punishment.”

I always thought it was "cruel and unusual" to put a duly sentenced criminal through years of appeals that mostly end the same: zaap.

Yes, DNA evidence has absolved a few of these, but the larger damage to justice from Furman has been far worse.

[Wuli]

How did Eisnhower and Nixon pick a Liberal like Blackmun.

Blackmun first gained a clerkship with Judge John B. Sanborn, a newly appointed judge to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. After clerking for Sanborn, Blackmun took a job as an associate for Junell, Driscoll, Fletcher, Dorsey & Barker, the best law firm in Minneapolis. He worked there for 16 years on taxation, trusts and estates, and civil litigation. During this time, Blackmun met Dorothy Clark in 1937 while playing tennis. The two married on June 21, 1941, and later had three daughters.

Motivated by his initial passion for medicine, Blackmun accepted a position as resident counsel for Mayo Clinic. His time at the clinic, which he described as the happiest decade of his life, earned him the attention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to replace Sanborn’s seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in 1959. Blackmun established himself as a conservative on the court. The majority of his opinions centered on taxation.

Math, not law was his basic and original academic groudning, followed by his personal interest towards medicine which he regreeted not folling. His legal work and his appealate decisions were primarily around commercial interests.

Maybe it was in that work that Eisenhower and Nixon saw a Conservative.

It would not be the first or last time Conservative politicians would misread favortism toward commercial interests as necessessarily “Conservative”. Then again, Eisenhower was no real Conservative and Nixon was mostly just “anti-Communist” and made many decisions as President that were not Conservative at all - like price controls, and the mistake of the opening to the CCP.

[nicollo]

I nominate William O. Douglas as the worst, appointed by FDR, promoter of invented Constitutional rights via substantive due process, the most leftists of leftist judges, and who inflicted incalculable damage upon this nation during his 36 years on the top bench, the longest ever.